Words

A Confession

Here at the house of Hey, Writer Guy I have been hiding a terrible secret. In my effort to appear cool and suave among all my Substack peers I have kept silent about a deeply troubling side of me.

I play Wordle.

Every day of the week.

Not only do I play Wordle every day, but I am also the facilitator, scorekeeper and rules adjudicator of a Wordle group.

Even just saying this, out loud, feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

To protect the equally guilty I will not speak the name of this Wordle group. Also I will only refer to the five members of this group by randomly assigned letters of the alphabet: A, D, J, M and T.

Why, you may ask, does a Wordle group need a rules adjudicator? The rules of Wordle are pretty straightforward. You have six chances to guess the five-letter word the Wordle algorithm is thinking of that day. That’s pretty much it. You get clues, like ‘that letter is not part of this word, dipstick’ or ‘right letter but in the wrong place, numbskull’.

It is a game that is both simple and judgemental at the same time.

But my secret Wordle group does not play by these rules. Yes, they are the basis of everything, but over the years we have been toiling away, far from the gaze of society, we have developed many excellent variations on basic Wordle play.

For instance this month, in my little Wordle world, it is “S For September”. This means that all our starter words must begin with the letter S. If you forget – as the anonymous T did on September 2^nd – then you are penalised a point and your 3 becomes a 4.

I am a vigilant but fair judge, who cannot be swayed by such things as marriage.

Often our months of Wordle fun have begun with us all starting each day with the same word, just to see what different paths we can take, from that common starting point to the assigned answer. My job, as facilitator, is to take the nominated starter words and to randomly assign them to a day of the month.

It is crazy zany fun times here at Casa Hey, Writer Guy, let me tell you.

A while ago, just to keep things relevant in these everchanging times (and also to stop us getting bored) we brought AI into our gameplay. April 2025 was, officially, “AI April”. I asked an AI to nominate the 30 best Wordle starter words. Every day, that month, we engaged with the future by starting with the same AI-generated starter word.

Across the board, our average scores got worse.

Not to be deterred from embracing our dystopian inevitability, May 2025 was designated the “Machine of May” and for our daily starter word we would use a word nominated by an AI as one of the 31 worst starter words in Wordle.

It is thanks to the “Machine of May” that we now know that the following words are all acceptable starter words in the game of Wordle: IMMIX, JUGUM, PZAZZ and QAJAQ.

Intriguingly PHPHY, which back then meant something along the lines of “the sound someone makes when they go ‘phphy’” was an acceptable starter but is now no longer accepted or even seems to exist. Just another example of AI eating away at our reality, I guess.

Unsurprisingly, across the board, our average scores got even worse.

Leaving the future behind, July 2025 was “Poetic July” in our happy little Wordleworld. Inspired at the Auckland Writers Festival by seeing British poet Lemn Sissay perform lovely little four-line poems from his book Let the Light Pour In, I asked our membership to each contribute a poem made up of 6 or 7 (because July has 31 days) 5-letter words, to share as our starter words.

WHILE QUIET CLING CLOSE HAPPY HEART

HAPPY STYLE GIRLY SHOPS SILLY AGAIN

HAIRY WOMAN LIKES SMALL QUIET MOUSE

CRAZY PANDA BRAGS ABOUT WEIRD SOCKS

ENJOY WORDS OFTEN MAKES SMILE GROWS WIDER

About now I should add a 2^nd confession to this confession.

I am not good at Wordle.

In fact, I am shit at Wordle.

Across the entire history of our Wordle group I usually finish up each month in last place, taking way more guesses than the others to find the chosen words. Intriguingly one of the criticisms that has followed me through my writing career has been that my 1^st draft scripts are usually way too long.

In Wordle as in life. Maybe I just love words too much that I can’t get enough of them.

In fact, the only month I have ever won our Wordle group competition was the month I invented Reverse Wordle. Yes, the fact that I was the only one who truly understood the rules of Reverse Wordle may have played a part in it, but it still remains the pinnacle of my entire Wordling career.

How, I hear those of you who have read this far ask, does Reverse Wordle work?

The object of actual Wordle is to guess the word as soon as possible. If you fail on your 6^th guess, you bust and get laughed at by all the others in your Wordle group.

Or so I have heard.

In Reverse Wordle the object of the game is to guess the word on your 6^th guess.

Across the month the object of the game, in your Wordle group, is to have the highest cumulative score, not the lowest.

Sounds easy? By the 3^rd or 4^th guess you know what the word will be so you throw in a couple of random guesses to pad things until the 6^th guess rolls round?

Not in my Reverse Wordle world. No sir or madam, there are rules that stop that sort of behaviour dead in its tracks.

You get a letter in the right place – you have to use that letter in the same place for all subsequent guesses.

You get a letter wrong – that letter is out. You cannot use letters you know for a fact are not in the word.

Right letter but wrong place? You get to pocket those for further down the track. They are the jokers in the pack.

What we found, during our month of bold Reverse Wordle innovation that actually only I enjoyed so we’ve never done it again, was that you generally had an idea what the word would be by about the 3^rd guess. Then it became an exercise in trying not to be forced to use that word on your 4^th or 5^th guess. In the process we discovered a lot of Wordle-acceptable words that we had never heard of.

Educational and a fun way to start the day, sometimes while seated upon the toilet. Who could ask for more?

My confession is done. Any residual respect I might have garnered among the Substack community has now fled the building. I am what I am – a Wordle man.

And, as “S for September” rolls on, I am still in fucking last place.

So no change there.